On September 17, 2009, Boston Private Financial Holdings (BPFH) sold its Coral Gables, Florida based Gibraltar Private Bank & Trust subsidiary for $93 million. On October 27, 2009, Scott Rothstein fled to Morocco on a private jet before turning himself in to authorities. Mr. Rothstein has...

Standard credit risk models cannot explain the observed clustering of default, sometimes described as "credit contagion." This paper provides the first empirical analysis of credit contagion via direct counterparty effects. We examine the wealth effects of bankruptcy announcements on creditors...

Whether credit rating agencies provide investors with private credit risk information is a central yet open empirical question. I use the introduction of a new rating type by Standard & Poor's reflecting expected recovery outcomes to isolate the effect of the information component in credit...

We show that the post earnings announcement drift (PEAD) is stronger for conglomerates thansingle-segment firms. Conglomerates, on average, are larger than single segment firms, so it isunlikely that limits-to-arbitrage drive the difference in PEAD. Rather, we hypothesize that marketparticipants...

How do financial markets price new information? This paper analyzes price setting at the intersection of private and public information, by testing whether and how the reaction of financial markets to public signals depends on the relative importance of private information in agents’...

This article contributes to the literature on macroeconomic announcements and their impact on asset prices by investigating how the 15-second Xetra DAX returns reflect the monthly announcements of the two best known business cycle forecasts for Germany, i.e. the ifo Business Climate Index and...

We use the Campbell (1991) return decomposition framework to reexamine the variation in the information content of earnings between profit firms and loss firms and over time. We show that current earnings surprises are more strongly correlated with the discount rate news component of returns for...

This paper introduces a new information density indicator to provide a more comprehensive understanding of price reactions to news and, more specifically, to the sources of jumps in financial markets. Our information density indicator, which measures the abnormal amount of noisy “ticker”...

Although China now has one of the largest government bond markets in the world, the market has received relatively little attention and analysis. We describe the history and structure of the market and assess its functioning. We find that trading in individual bonds was historically sparse but...

This paper provides evidence that the 52-week high serves as a psychological barrier, inducing expectational errors and underreaction to news. Two clear predictions emerge and are confirmed in the data. First, nearness to a 52-week high induces expectational errors; evidence from earnings...